Dr. Judy Iseke, director/producer of Wesaketewenowuk: Roots Growing Up. As a filmmaker, author, educator, and researcher, Dr. Judy Iseke understands the importance of revitalizing the highly threatened Michif language, which is key to Métis culture and knowledge for future generations.

Dr. Judy Iseke’s new film and website comprise a “cultural ecosystem” designed to build “resources to inform educators interested in reconciliation and language revitalization”

As a filmmaker, author, educator, and researcher, Dr. Judy Iseke understands the importance of revitalizing the highly threatened Michif language, which is key to Métis culture and knowledge for future generations.

Her latest film Wesaketewenowuk: Roots Growing Up, supported through an EHC Project Accelerator grant, follows Elder Tom McCallum and musician Andrea Menard on a walk through the natural and built landscapes of Edmonton, creating a Michif song as they go.

The way Michif is spoken varies based on a speaker’s experiences in Métis family, community, and culture, including a variety of influences from French and Cree languages. Just as the Métis culture and creation of Michif language represent exchange, the exchange between McCallum, Menard, and Iseke results in a new cultural creation. Andrea is not fluent in Michif, and her song is created from McCallum’s stories and translations as well as his idea (shared during a trip from downtown into the river valley via funicular) to pair the song with a jig.

Musician Andrea Menard and Elder Tom McCallum share a song

An author, educator, and researcher in addition to producer/director, Judy is excited about the opportunities for collaboration offered by creative filmmaking

Her next project? Michif Wesakechak Tune, an animation of the Cree trickster character Wesakechak in an urban Edmonton setting, with Elder McCallum telling “new stories based on the oral tradition . . . teaching his granddaughter about Wesakechak and the Michif language.”

Judy is excited about the opportunities for collaboration offered by creative filmmaking as she explores ways to unlock and share the wisdom and power of language, place, and oral traditions in modern times.

Wesaketewenowuk. The seven-syllable Michif word is the very apt title for Dr. Judy Iseke’s new short documentary that will be shown Saturday at the Musée Héritage Museum. The screening is part of a celebration of Métis culture and the launch of her new internet resource called Our Elder Stories.

Elder Tom McCallum sits with Andrea Menard for Our Elder Stories, Dr. Judy Iseke’s look into the Michif language. Iseke will screen the film and host a launch for a new Michif Elders storytelling website called Our Elder Stories. That event takes place this coming Saturday afternoon at the Musée Héritage Museum. JUDY ISEKE/Photo

“Wesaketewenowuk … it means like roots growing up. A fire has gone through and it’s burned everything. There’s nothing left, or it seems like there’s nothing left, and then new life begins to grow from beneath, from the roots,” Iseke began.

“Tom uses that as a metaphor for Métis people: we’ve come through a fire, the fire of colonization, and yet, we’re still here. We’re resilient. We’re still hanging on to our culture and our language sometimes by a thread, but we’re still here.”

Tom is Elder Tom McCallum, who is joined by singer and songkeeper Andrea Menard in the 14-minute film. The two talk about Métis resilience and the importance of using storytelling and song to keep the endangered Michif language alive and thriving.

Director Iseke said she is fascinated by language and the essential role it plays in cultural development and the human condition. She has been working with Métis Elders for more than two decades with the goal to rejuvenate Michif, the language of the Métis people, yet it is now spoken by fewer than two per cent of that population.

The two worked together to develop a new Michif language song, one that was based on based on McCallum’s Elder stories and that Menard wrote and performed. It’s a beautiful collaboration and the film is indeed beautiful and inspiring with her voice and his jig, scenes of nature playing throughout to reinforce that theme of resilience.

Iseke hopes to use Wesaketewenowuk as just one tool of a larger internet-based resource called Our Elder Stories. Found at ourelderstories.com, anyone can access other videos featuring stories, films, and songs, along with other learning mechanisms and supports about the Michif and Cree languages, and other publications and news.

Language, she said, is the key to culture.

“Because our language is so threatened, I wanted to track the language and record the language, but I also wanted to give Elders a chance to talk about their lives, their stories, their communities, their families. They certainly did that.”

The comprehensive project, she continued, has already taken many years and has had no shortage of participation. The website only offers 170 recordings but she has a treasure trove of many others that she created along the way.

“What we did is we translated first all the stories, because I’m not a speaker of this language. Most people my age are not. Most of our speakers are in their 60s and 70s and older. We recorded all their stories: there were sets of questions that I gave to the Elders ahead of time and then they told stories around those things. Then we translated all of those stories and then transcribed them all.”

It was a tough project as each of the Elders who she recorded speaks a different form of Michif, though they’re all based on Cree, she said, adding it was fascinating work but very time-consuming. It meant having Elmer Ghostkeeper act as the live translator, but because of the nature of Michif, the exact translation can never be fully realized: you have to understand the language. This meant the transcription for each recording offers a very close approximation to what was being said.

“We wanted the richness of the Elders’ stories at least to come across.”

The website offers stories that Iseke selected based on a variety of factors, including audience interest and length, and what she thought would be most accessible to the broadest sector of the viewing audience. There are other recordings that she had to hold back, perhaps for future release or for other projects.

“Some of these Elders are very powerful spiritual leaders and they told some very important spiritual stories, but some of those we chose to leave out because we felt they were maybe not appropriate for an internet space,” she continued.

She hopes Our Elder Stories will lead to a resurgence of interest in Michif and that someday more Métis people will speak the language than those who don’t. The website is designed to be accessible, engaging and interesting enough on a variety of subjects to keep people coming back for more.

“It helps people listen to the language. Hear our stories. Hear the stories of the Elders, and enjoy the many lessons that they provide. There are sections on teachings. There are sections on teaching the language, which is a different topic. There are stories about storytelling, and it’s importance in our communities. I think there’s a rich diversity of stories and we tried to choose the ones that are in the most compelling and most interesting. There’s a whole section on humour, which is hilarious.”

The event runs from 2 to 4 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 26, at the Musée Héritage Museum. Attendance is free.

Pretty soon, the world is going to sing songs about the mighty superhero Red Fang who saves the day from evildoers and other threats to global safety, all thanks to Rudy Janvier.

The St. Albert-raised filmmaker is one of 30 people who were all recently chosen to have their various film projects funded through the Indigenous Storyteller edition of Telus Storyhive. The program, now several years old, runs through multiple themed editions each year, with all kinds of video categories such as web series, digital shorts, documentary, and animation among them. These open competitions offer dozens of winning contestants not only thousands of dollars in project funding but they connect them with valuable mentors and more.

“The main thing we focus on is the growth of the content creator’s career so every Storyhive grant comes with customized career training so we would work with the creator to identify where they would like support and we pair them up with mentors to help support them throughout the project,” explained Telus Storyhive project manager Smita Acharyya.

The winning filmmakers have been given $20,000 to complete their works with support and mentorship from the National Screen Institute. Once completed, Telus will offer a venue for them to be seen online (on both www.storyhive.com and on Telus’s YouTube channel) and on television through its Community Showcase program on Telus Optik video on demand platform for more than one million of its subscribers in B.C. and Alberta.

“We say ‘we give where we live’ so wherever TELUS has distribution across B.C. and Alberta, we like to give back to the local community there and we do this with community access programming.”

Janvier is excited about the prospect of reaching such a broad audience, especially because it has such an important and contemporary real world basis. The plot is firmly rooted in the ongoing tragedy of our country’s many missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, even though the filmmaker was ultimately inspired by some decidedly Marvel-ous cinematic trends.

“This is like the movie Black Panther. Hollywood’s been doing a lot of stuff where they’re showing a lot of other people from different backgrounds. You see a lot more movies with not just your traditional American families: people of minority groups and stuff like that. And so Red Fang is like an answer to that and how we can do that in a more Indigenous way,” he said.

His story is about a young man named Oliver, one who Janvier says lives a selfish life who spends all his time either at the gym or at work. As he turns 25, he finds his missing sister’s diary, which might have clues to her disappearance. On top of that, he starts having strange visions, marking his transformation into a fated warrior who will develop special powers. It’s a fantastic story rich in Indigenous mythology of ancestors and animal guides.

“I still have that spirit of things but then I also talk about it in a kind of fun way and that’s where the superhero part kind of comes in.”

This is a big deal for Janvier and he’s not taking the opportunity lightly.

“I haven’t really done anything major. I’ve been dabbling in smaller stuff. This is one of my first forays into a larger project. I just happened to be able to get this grant to do this.”

As for Dr. Iseke, she is no stranger to filmmaking, having produced a number of historical documentaries including A Living History of Métis Families and Understanding What Life is About – Storytelling with Tom McCallum.

Her project is called Michif Stories with Land. She wanted to commit to film the story of Michif, the language of the Métis people. It’s a threatened language, she said, with fewer than 800 speakers. Her documentary sets out to record the “intergenerational process” of developing Michif language songs for teaching the language with the help of Michif-speaking Elder McCallum as well as internationally-renowned singer-songwriter and activist Andrea Menard. Their stories and songs will use Michif metaphors to help connect Métis people to their land.

“One of the foundational aspects of being an Indigenous person is our relationship to our territories, to our homeland. St. Albert is very much a part of that homeland. What I’m really exploring in this film is the relationship to the land and how that is shifted. We’re urbanized now, but historically, we would have been out on the land and living more closely with the land,” she said.

Iseke, Janvier and the 28 other filmmakers have until July to finish and submit their works. Afterward, they should be available for viewing on various platforms in the fall.

A 5-year SSHRC Insight Grant has been

awarded to Dr. Judy Iseke, Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Knowledge and Research. These funds will support the research program entitled “Indigenous Knowledge and Music in Indigenous Language: Storytelling in Education”. The total amount of the grant is $489,590 and is expected to employ between 4 and 12 Lakehead students.

This research program with Metis Elders is to help understand Indigenous knowledge systems and Michif language in Indigenous education. Some more of Iseke’s work in this field is featured on her webpage, www.ourelderstories.com

One output of this research will be an Indigenous knowledge, storytelling, and music research tool and archive. The development, design, implementation, and output of the research is a collaborative effort between Iseke, Indigenous graduate students, community Elders and the Michif Cultural and Resource Institute (MCRI) in St. Albert, Alberta.

Kim Latimer interviews Judy Iseke-Barnes

on CBC Radio to talk about her film ‘A Living History of Métis Families as told by Dorothy Chartrand’ and to promote its premiere which took place on Thursday, Feb. 26, 2009 for Innovation Week 2009.

]]>Premiere of film by Dr. Judy Iseke-Barnes during Lakehead University’s Research and Innovation Week.https://ourelderstories.com/metis/premiere-of-film-by-dr-judy-iseke/
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‘A Living History of Métis Families as told by Dorothy Chartrand’

February 24, 7:00-8:30 p.m., ATAC 2001, Lakehead University

Lakehead University Associate Professor Judy Iseke-Barnes, Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Education, worked with various groups to record in film the story of Métis families in Canada. Métis grandmother Dorothy Chartrand tells the story of her Métis families, and the political and social change that impacted Métis lives in the 1800s until today: her family’s relocation, the effects of government land policies, and ways that Métis women in the fur trade, and later community life, helped to sustain communities.